Big Sex Little Death: A Memoir (2 page)

I came of age and became a sexual adult at the moment that women — in jeans and no bras, of course — were taking to the streets. Sexual liberation and feminism were inseparable topics to my best friends in high school. As I entered my twenties and feminists began to disown one another over sexual expression, it reminded me all too well of what I went though in the labor movement, civil rights, the Left — “let the weak fight among themselves.” Radical feminists didn’t need FBI infiltration — the mechanism for sisterly cannibalization was already well under way.

When I was first involved in politics, it was part of our group ethos not to proclaim our names and so-called talent all over the map — it went against our sense of the collective. When people ask me how I became a professional writer, I couldn’t give them a “climb-the-ladder” scenario, because I went out my way to be part of a group. Everyone was supposed to know how to write, talk, run a web press, unclog a toilet, stage a demonstration.

I saw a news article today by a corporate headhunter who said he liked to get under his applicants’ skin by asking them how, exactly, they were most misunderstood. What an endearing literary question!

It was a good interrogation to ask myself, mid-memoir. What do people think about me that is off base? And how do I gauge this misperception?

Most people unfamiliar with my work imagine that anyone with the youthful nickname of “Susie Sexpert” must be an adolescent airhead, a happy but too-dim nympho, someone who set out to shock her strict parents — or, alternatively, was raised in a den of hedonists.

They also think, along the “dumb blond” trajectory, that I just haven’t thought things through, about where sexual liberation might lead — how a female Narcissus could drown in a pool of clitoral self-absorption and drag unfortunate others with her.

I would say, for one, I was motivated, always, from the sting of social injustice. The cry of “That isn’t fair!” gets a more impulsive behavior from me than, “I want to get off.”

My parents were far more radical than I am, because of basic changes in their generation: My mother didn’t die in childbirth. She went to college. My parents married even though they weren’t of the same religion. They divorced — before that became the American way of life. My father’s ashes can be found in a Native burial ground instead of a WASP family plot. They strayed so much further than I did from their immediate ancestors. They were better educated than I, but I have had a bigger mouth. I don’t know who to blame for that.

The other side of my character, the one that isn’t the “Sí, se puede” version of Auntie Mame, is exemplified by loss, constant and too-early. I’m more preoccupied with people dying than people coming.

In the world of sexual risk and revolutionary politics, a lot of voyagers die before their time. Evangelist Jerry Falwell famously preached at feminists, queers, and integrationists that all their fatal problems — their assassinations and plagues — were retribution from an angry God, who wanted people to keep their legs crossed and drink at the “colored fountain.”

I don’t believe in God or retribution, but I accept that there are consequences from pushing, hard. Pioneers don’t look good on an actuarial table. Sex radicals tend to be excellent at hospice care, at the rites of the dying, at memories that leave legacies. Perhaps because we are blunt about sex, we’re not so afraid of death’s taboo, either.

Every loss uncovers an edge about why we persevere in spite of the empty space. Sex — its quixotic vitality, not its banal marketability — is one of those things that makes you feel like, “I’m not done yet.”

This memoir is a progress, not a final deliverance. You’ll see some of the flowers that pressed themselves into my scrapbook. Using Mr. Mailer’s criteria, I'm going for “dykily psychotic,” definitely “bright,” and, hopefully, crowning.

First Bites

Baby Teeth

I
couldn’t sleep last night. Every drunk yelling under the window finally slipped away by four am and left the street silent. My lover was deep in slumber. I curled up against his back and woke him up.

“Jon, tell me a story,” I said. “You know, a really personal story.”

It’s a little joke between us that if he talks to me in intimate, sonorous tones, I will fall into a dead sleep. The more secret the story, the sooner I’ll drift off.

I thought of a question to get him started. “When you were a little boy, what was the first time you can remember getting hurt?”

Jon remembered a spill. He took a fall in the public commons of a housing project in State College, Pennsylvania. He was running — tripped and scraped his knee on the edge of a slate staircase. He remembered the blood pouring out of his knee, the shock of all that red ink. His mother came running out, bundled him up, wiped his tears. I’ve always wanted to be bundled like that.

I fell asleep dreaming of a mommy’s blanket.

I remember the first time I got hurt. I was bit by a little girl, hard enough to bleed.

I was in a daycare, the first daycare I can remember. My mother was working as a secretary, and we were living in Berkeley after her divorce from my father.

I hated this daycare. The rooms were large, cold — even in my memories it looks like a set from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. When the teachers got impatient with you, they rolled out dark, narrow, wooden panels, seven feet high, that they could wheel into position and use to effectively trap you in a box, anywhere on the floor.

You could see light at the top — the panels did not reach the ceiling — but otherwise it was like being stuck in a refrigerator. You lay on the floor inside your “box,” and they told you not to make a sound or it would get worse.

Outside the classroom area, there was an asphalt yard. One afternoon a little girl with raven curls and blue eyes — I remember being struck by how pretty she was, even at two — came right up to me, grabbed my forearm, and sank her teeth in.

I have no idea why. I yelled bloody murder; I saw the marks and red holes welt up on my skin. Someone — not our mothers — rushed over and punished both of us. We were walled up in separate boxes.

I had complained about the box to my mother with no effect before. But this time, there was no hiding the injury. I remember her outrage — and her impulse. Elizabeth jumped into the car and I sat at home watching the kitchen clock, imagining the tongue-thrashing she was going to give them. I never had to go back there again. When she came home, she was grim, but I could tell it was over.

There’s never any misunderstanding about broken skin. No “What if?” or “Should I care?” We yell or cry out, hit or block; there’s no wondering how we feel.

When I first started teaching about sex, in my thirties, I tried to whittle down what it was that people viscerally react to when sex horrifies them. I kept coming back to our openings, the expected and unexpected openings to the body. We don’t like invasions we didn’t ask for.

I did an exercise with a classroom of mine, students analyzing sexual representation. I said, “Let’s try to get to the nitty-gritty of what is called ‘offensive.’ Let’s stop talking about it.” I gave them all crayons and butcher paper, reminiscent of a daycare.

I set the mood. “I want you to quickly sketch the most disgusting, abhorrent thing you can think of, the thing you are utterly repelled by, the thing that you cannot endure for one second.”

I told them I didn’t care if it was phobic, or irrational, or if everyone would probably agree with their choice. Just to go for it.

I asked them to draw two pictures. One that depicted an “offensive” situation that was not about sex. Another one that was pointedly sexual.

We pinned the drawings to the wall. It was a parade of horrors and sillies. It was hard to stop laughing or gasping. Of course, most of the students were not adept renderers, and their pictures were crude. I had given them only a few minutes.

The nonsexual themes of offense evoked brutal violence, the monster vs. the mouse. Images of people hurting children, or animals, or each other in a vast war. The red crayon was used to draw the cuts, the explosions, the cruelty. The world split open. Faces with blue tears pouring out of the eyes. Anyone can draw that.

The sexual offenses were sometimes fetishistic, other times universal. Many students went to shit. One student drew an ice cube tray of “shit-sicles” — god, how did he ever think of that? There were the bugaboos of the sexually inexperienced: anal sex, ew. Oral sex, ugh. One young man drew a dripping snatch, the horror. But others drew a penis that wouldn’t stop ejaculating, choking its recipient. Gang rape was represented. One young woman drew the aftermath line of a violent abortion. Her belly and vagina cut open. Someone drew a penis forced in another’s ear.

The themes of bullying and powerlessness unified us. But sexual confessions were more surreal. They were unusual … or symbolic. The students knew that their fears were unlikely to come true, or were exaggerated — but the horror persisted nevertheless.

I kept saying, “Look at the openings.” The place where we say, “I can push out, but you can’t push in.”

We take tremendous pleasure in those same places, but there’s no ignoring their perilous entry. We don’t want to be caught off guard; we don’t want to be preempted and struck.

Our nose, ears. Eyes, mouths, vaginas. Anuses. Our tender flesh. We arrive bundled up, and we don’t want any poking. We work up the courage to invite another’s hands, tongue, a soft or persistent pleasure.

It’s the opposite of automatic. When you’re born, you don’t know you’re separate from your mother. As your baby-self grows, it starts to dawn on you: The umbilical cord is gone. You become conscious of where you begin and where your mother ends. You realize you have to protect your own tender openings.

I didn’t want to get bit by that pretty little girl at the evil daycare. She reminded me of Rose Red. I was Snow White. I was smitten with her perfect face and piercing eyes. I thought she was coming to me with a wreath of flowers instead of incisors.

So my early desire was nipped. I wanted to smell, to listen, to taste, to be felt and achingly fondled … with discrimination. I wanted to speak my mind and be understood. That bite proved something I wasn’t able to get across any other way.

Would I have learned anything without being hurt? I was hurt too much, like most of us … and not by incoherent, dazzling two-year-olds. More by the wall-boxers. There was way too many of them.

I was bullied as a kid because I was intellectually precocious but socially inappropriate. I read constantly, but I had my thumb in my mouth half the time. My moral universe was populated with fairy tales my mother read me, opera librettos and folk songs she’d sing to me — I had no idea what kids were talking about down the street. I wore thick glasses at a time when you didn’t see many children with prescription lenses. My shoes were funny and the hems of my hand-sewn dresses fell below my knees. I attended ten schools before I was seventeen and had a vocabulary that didn’t sou
nd as if it had come from anywhere nearby, because we never had.

My mother and I moved every year or two, all our belongings stuffed into a 1963 VW Bug. When Elizabeth got fed up with something, she cleared out. There was no doubting the injustice that propelled her.

One time she was teaching English and German at a local high school in Contra Costa County, the barren eastern side of the San Francisco Bay Area. It was Christmastime, and she decorated her classroom with a few UNICEF cards, National Geographic-style photographs of people celebrating winter seasonal holidays all over the world. I remember urging her to put the Diwali card in the best-lit corner, because I loved the photograph of the little Indian girls surrounded with candles, bangles sparkling on their arms.

Elizabeth had costume jewelry pins to wear for all the holidays; I loved helping her clasp them to her Jackie Kennedy shifts. She was so slim she could carry them off like a model — and would wear every bright color, including fuchsia lipstick, especially on drab days. For Diwali, she wore some of her blue and gold glass bangles from the early days of her marriage when living in Bangalore with my father.

The vice principal came into the classroom the first afternoon of Diwali — you had to wonder, who’d tipped him off about a Hindi holiday?

“He told me to take the cards down,” Elizabeth said, “this instant — that UNICEF was a front for the Communist Party and would not be tolerated at Amador High.” She laughed, as if CP members would take an interest in a rural spur of California that was about to change from walnut groves to suburban tract homes.

“What did you say, Mommy? What does that mean?”

Elizabeth dragged in some empty milk cartons from the car to load our records and books. She had already made the decision to move. “I told him he was an idiot.”

I didn’t get explicit political rhetoric in our house. It was all inferred. I had no idea what communism was, or what its opposite might be. Hating winter solstice?

What I understood is that there were bigots and bullies everywhere, and you coped with them by giving them a piece of your mind and then turning your back on them forever. Did the silent treatment teach them a lesson? I was never there long enough to find out.